Hello,

> My system:  A Mac IIsi, 320M hard drive, 17M RAM, Asante Ethernet card
> -- trying to use/learn/play around with 1.5.1
> -- connected to an on-campus LAN (several T1 lines to the "external" world
> from campus)

Welcome to NetBSD!

> Every couple of minutes (not just during bootup), I get the "ae0:  warning
> - receiver ring buffer overrun" message.  I've also noticed that I can't
> get sup to run.  That is, I type "sup -s" or "sup -s -v"; sup starts, the
> disk grinds for a while, then the next thing I know, I've been logged out
> and am looking at a login prompt.  How likely is it that the netword card
> overruns and the sup crashes are related?  Is there a (relatively easy) way
> to slow down the traffic coming through to my machine?

Let's separate the issues. First, the receiver ring buffer overrun message
comes from being on a really noisy ethernet segment. There is no harm,
there is no real fix (aside from getting a connection to a switched port),
and I would guess is due to the amount of traffic that is typical in a
campus environment (lots of peer to peer file sharing).

Separately, DHCP and sup:

> Meanwhile, I'm having DHCP problems.  How should I configure the
> "/etc/dhclient-script" file?  Right now, the DHCP client seems to run twice
> during startup, and I'm not sure why.  Also, if I'm getting the ip address
> from a DHCP server, then how can I know what entry to put in my /etc/hosts
> file so that the network knows who my machine is?
> Sorry for the newbie-type questions.  I'm continuing to look for answers to
> these questions myself (Thanks, Google!) but thought that I'd post here,
> too.  Just covering my bases.

How did you tell the system to run dhclient? There should be just one
entry of dhclient=YES (and dhclient_flags="ae0") in /etc/rc.conf. There
shouldn't be any other dhclients (check rc.local and your root's crontab).

There is no way for the network to know what your machine's name is unless
the network administrators allow for persistent leases and do DNS. This
won't have anything to do with your current setup, though; but once you
get a dhcp lease, you could use someone else's DNS server to point an
address to your machine (provided your IP doesn't change too often).

It seems that your school's network is Microsoft based (you should figure
out how much of your tuition is paying to maintain the software licenses
and the MCSE workfare program), as the school's web site is hosted on NT.
If this is the case, then you will probably have ongoing DHCP problems.

See how long your DHCP lease is; if it's less than 12 hours, you probably
won't be able to sup an entire source tree before your lease runs out. If
the lease is really short, that would explain why you can't sup. Check
this out. There's also the possibility that someone on the network is
trying to screw with other people by running his/her own DHCP server.

If the lease is short, or it gets renewed by either the real server or
someone's fake DHCP server too often, then you can get a lease, then kill
dhclient;  you should be able to keep that IP for at least as long as the
lease was supposed to last, and perhaps longer.

Good luck,
John Klos